At present, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard organization of the United States of America is formulating the 802.11ah standard and puts forward a requirement that a coverage area of an access point should cover one kilometer. This means that a distance of 100 meters covered by the access point supported by the existing 802.11 standard is increased by 100 times. In addition, a primary application scenario proposed for the 802.11ah standard is a sensor network, for example, a wireless sensor network for detecting a forest fire. The access point supported by the 802.11ah standard has a coverage radius of 1 kilometer, which is far greater than the 100-meter coverage-radius defined in such standards as 802.11a/b/g/n. However, to implement effective detection in an area with a radius of 1 kilometer, the number of 802.11ah-compliant sensors required to be deployed may exceed 6,000. However, because a station (Station, STA) used for sensor detection is usually powered by a battery, and due to the number of the stations to be deployed and a deployment scenario (for example, a mountain forest), it is inconvenient for a user to replace and maintain a battery of an STA.
According to the current Wi-Fi standards, for example, the series of 802.11 standards, on both an uplink and a downlink, an STA working in basic network mode directly communicates with an access point (Access Point, AP) at a power negotiated with the AP. The negotiated communication power is directly related to a distance between the STA and the AP. Therefore, during communication with the AP, STAs that are deployed in a coverage area of the AP and have different distances from the AP have different power consumption rates. In general, on a precondition of a transmission task with a same amount of data, an STA farther from the AP consumes more power. In addition, more power may be consumed due to deployment of an STA (for example, a barrier exists between the STA and the AP). Therefore, a few STAs with low capacity may be unable to continuously perform normal data transmission with the AP due to excessively quick power consumption.